Kay Ryan, Our Sly Poet Laureate
Introducing Kay Ryan, our Poet Laureate
(via)
Like Jasper Johns, Ryan frequently focuses upon objects or language with which we are so familiar that we may have forgotten to pay much attention any longer, forcing a fresh look. Perhaps no other poet, except Ashbery, brings back to life dull and overused terms or platitudinous sayings as often and as well as Kay Ryan. In Ryan’s poetry, clichéd and hackneyed phrases become sources of inspiration.(One Poet’s Notes - Kay Ryan the Niagara River)
Kay Ryan, Outsider With Sly Style, Named Poet Laureate (NYtimes)
In 1976 she finally realized that she could not escape the poet inside her. She had decided to ride a bicycle from California to Virginia in 80 days. Riding along the Hoosier Pass in the Colorado Rockies, she said, she felt an incredible opening up, “an absence of boundaries, an absence of edges, as if my brain could do anything.”
I Go to AWP – lifetime of preferring not to
I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences. It’s been a point of honor: the whole cooperative workshopping thing, not for me.
One of Ryan’s poems – “How Birds Sing” – is permanently installed at the Central Park Zoo in New York City. “It’s on top of a little retaining wall that children run up and down on,” she said. (Sfgate)
I like her a lot. (Am happy that it was her who got the prize and not this guy who is obsessed with rank and hierarchy, his weblog is tagged “focused on contemporary poetry and poetics” -I thought it read poetry and politics)